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alupoj

Member

Registered: 2019-01-25

Posts: 80  

Can Bochs VM help to avoid spectre and meltdown types of attacks?

Can bochs full emulation prevent escaping from guest to host using spectre like vulnerabilities?

alupoj

Member

Registered: 2019-01-25

Posts: 80  

Re: Can Bochs VM help to avoid spectre and meltdown types of attacks?

Does an ability of a guest to escape into the host address space depend on a type of virtualization?

For example slow full emulation like in Bochs (when original CPU instructions are converted to other instructions before execution) vs fast hardware virtualization (when CPU instructions are executed almost unchanged just in another context) if I understand correctly ?

What about a full emulation of even another architecture? Say fully emulating immune Cortex A53 virtual hardware on a X86 hardware which is not immune to spectre by itself?

Is it so easy to produce a code for a Cortex A53 virtual guest CPU which would be translated into vulnerable hardware X86 host instructions?